The introduction of digital methods of broadcasting has revolutionised media management in production and transmission environments. The explosion in the volume of content that is now available to publishers and the corresponding capacity available from digital transmission systems to deliver it to consumers has presented challenges to media management. The alliance of these developments and the availability of affordable national, regional and fully global network resources has opened the prospect that media systems need not be limited by local or regional scope. Whether a media publisher is limited to local or fully global cover the systems needed to support their operations should scale such that each operator can use the same technical infrastructure defined by the same concepts and standards.
A distribution system for video and audio content comprises a plurality of nodes between a source of video content (e.g. a studio, satellite receiver, server) and a sink of video content (e.g. a satellite uplink, an end user). In the delivery path between the source and the sink the video content will typically be subject to processing operations (transforms). The processing operations may alter various parameters of the video content, such as coding rate, coding type, picture aspect ratio, frame rate, audio rate, audio format. Processing operations may be required to match local requirements, such as a video format used in the country where the sink is located. Processing operations may be required to convert media content into a form which is compatible with requirements of different end user devices (e.g. portable devices will typically require a lower bitrate stream compared to a set-top box).
A general purpose communication network (e.g. an IP-based network) is typically only concerned with delivering traffic between two (or more) endpoints, with packet switching at intermediate nodes. In contrast, a media content processing/distribution system comprises equipment which performs specialist processing operations to the media content carried within IP packets (e.g. coding, decoding, transcoding, transrating). A user may require a particular sub-set of these processing operations for a delivery stream, and typically there is a particular order in which these processing operations must be performed. Accordingly, the challenges facing a media distribution system are different to those facing a general-purpose communication network.
Currently, the control and configuration of large media content processing/distribution systems (which may comprise hundreds of geographically dispersed physical devices) is performed controlled through a dedicated GUI per device, or a dedicated GUI per sub-system (e.g. small set of devices).
Currently, video distribution systems are configured manually. A product called nCompass Control supplied by Ericsson™ provides a graphical user interface (GUI) by which a user can create a map of the system. A user can manually insert an icon on the map to represent each device in the system and can manually configure links between the icons representing devices. The process requires manual inspection of equipment racks to gather information to populate the map. The current process of controlling the network is time-consuming. As systems become increasingly large and more complex it is becoming increasingly more difficult for a user to control the system, and to perform operations such as setting up a delivery path for a media content flow. When a user of the control system wants to create a new path between a content source and a content sink, they must select a path across the network and then individually manipulate an interface for each device along that path.
The present invention seeks to provide an improved way of controlling a media content distribution system.